We spent the next few days in and around Beijing visiting Tian'anmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the emperor's Summer Palace on Kunming Lake, the Hutong district and the Great Wall. The first day was rainy and not conducive to taking photos so here's where I've included some postcard pictures.
Tian'anmen Square is the largest and most famous square in the world. I suppose you could say it is "infamous" after the 1989 pro-democracy protests that found one lone protester facing a line of tanks. As it turned out, we were visiting during China's National Day, a week-long commemoration of the founding of the communist People's Republic of China. As you can see by the photos, the place was full of people and decorated for the occasion with lots of potted flowers and shrubs as well as topiaries promoting the coming 2008 Olympics to be held in Beijing. Apparently, this is the one occasion on which the photo of Dr Sun Yet Sen is brought out to face Mao Zedong in "dialogue". I have to say, it was pretty darned cool to be in this place that is so famous and has such historical significance for China and the world. It was similar to the way I felt when I first saw Mt Rushmore in real life. You've seen lots of pictures of it and you know it really exists, but to actually be there makes it come alive in a way that nothing else could.
TIAN'ANMEN SQUARE PHOTOS HERE
The Forbidden City is just across the avenue from Tian'anmen Square. You have to walk through the gate right under the picture of Mao to enter from this side. If you have not seen the film "The Last Emperor" I recommend it. We watched it again just before this trip. The Forbidden City was built in the early 1400s during the Ming Dynasty and the last emperor of China, who came to power as a child, was imprisoned here during most of his life. This was during the time of Sun Yat-Sen who led the reformation of the Chinese government.
FORBIDDEN CITY PHOTOS HERE
TEMPLE OF HEAVEN PHOTOS HERE
Because it is hot in Beijing in the summer time there is a Summer Palace for the emperor and his family on Lake Kunming. It's a very beautiful park with spectacular views of a Buddhist Temple up on a hill and a pagoda across the lake.
SUMMER PALACE PHOTOS HERE
Beijing is obviously very proud to be hosting the next Olympics and they are working hard to spiff up the place in preparation for the event. They are doing lots of renovation work in the Forbidden City and other places in anticipation of the millions of visitors they will have during that time. They've built two very interesting new sports venues, the Water Cube for swimming and diving and the Nest, a stadium for track and field events. Beijing is the third largest city in China with a population of about 18million. Even so, they have lots of problems to overcome to be able to handle this event. The most obvious problem will be the smog. Beijing is a rapidly growing city with lots of diesel powered buses (it's no longer a city of bicycles.) Of course, being a country where the government has much more control than here and where people have a lot of national pride, they could just decide that no one will drive for a few days and that would make a big dent in the problem. It seems to me that there are other infrastructure problems as well. I don't know that the sewage system could handle such a huge influx of visitors. At this time the Chinese cannot even flush their used toilet paper down the toilet. There are flush toilets but the paper goes into a trash basket next to the toilet. (Not to mention that most westerners are not used to "squat" toilets!) And the passenger handling at the Beijing airport is extremely inefficient. You wait at the gate and then when they call boarding for your flight there is no orderly progression by row because, in fact, you aren't going to get on the plane! You walk down what looks like a ramp to the plane only to find yourself on the tarmac where you have to get on a bus-like vehicle. Then they drive around the tarmac to try and find your plane. At times, it seemed as if the driver was actually lost! Once they find your plane you have to walk up a long flight of stairs (depending on how big your plane is) to board. Heaven forbid if you have any sort of mobility problems or small children to deal with! Then, to top it off, the area where we waited for our San Francisco flight in the Beijing airport had several gates in the same area but only one restroom which had only two stalls!
OLYMPICS PHOTOS HERE
We had an opportunity to go for a walk in the area around our hotel one evening. I loved that part. What I enjoy most about traveling, especially to foreign countries, is just seeing how people live their everyday lives. (Unfortunately, being on this tour didn't afford us a lot of those opportunities.) I've included a few snapshots taken on that walk. The thing I found so fascinating in China is that there are few boundaries in their lives: public vs private, work vs play, home vs community… Except in some of the more modern cities most of the shops don't actually have any sort of "facade" that separates the shop from the street. No glass, no door, nothing. There is just something like a garage door that rolls up and down. (Some shops in Mexico and other third world countries are like this.) So there's not much separation between what goes on in the shop and outside the shop. Motorcycle repair shops do their work on the side walk and food stands cook in the doorway (presumably to keep the charcoal smoke from asphyxiating people.) I saw many shops with beds, tables and televisions where people were living their lives and "working" at the same time. (Though I guess that's not much different that me eating at my desk at work!) Walking down the streets near our hotel we saw girls dressed up on their way to some night club and people washing cars (taxis) in the stall next to the night club. Guys were cooking meat sticks in makeshift barbeques up and down the street in the midst of laundry hanging out everywhere.
AROUND BEIJING PHOTOS HERE
Walking on the Great Wall was certainly a highlight of the trip. This particular section is obviously visited by many tourists (both local and foreign) as it is easily accessible from Beijing. A couple of myths to be dispelled:
- there is not ONE long wall. There are many different sections built over many hundreds of years by many dynasties. There is a great article on the Great Wall in the January 2003 National Geographic Magazine. The section we visited was built in the Ming Dynasty in the Juyongguan Pass.
- You cannot see the Great Wall from the moon. It's unlikely that you can see it from anywhere in space. As you can see from the photos, while it may be long it is not so massive in width or height that you could distinguish it from it's surroundings from that far away.
The last thing I really want to talk about in Beijing is the Hutong tour. In the rapid modernization of China many things about their past are being lost. The hutong areas of Beijing are among those things. They are the sections of town where people have lived for hundreds of years in small, tile roofed, single story homes. The streets and alleys of the hutongs are bordered by walls of courtyards with doorways in them. Most of the doorways lead to a courtyard that is shared by several families, each living in a small home that opens into the yard. If you watch many Chinese films you have seen these types of dwellings. These hutongs were especially prevalent in Beijing but many are now being torn down to make way for new, modern, high rise apartment buildings. The government of China has realized that at least some of these areas should be preserved so they have designated certain areas as historic sites. At the same time, they are turning these areas into tourist attractions. It's sad and ironic that places where people are living and have lived for generations are not being preserved as homes and communities so much as another way to attract tourists and make money. As you can see by the photos in the accompanying album, the "rickshaw" tour was more like a pedicab amusement park! It was just crazy! It was fun in the way an amusement park is fun but even though we visited a woman in her home, it didn't seem like we really got a sense of how people live and what their lives were like. She was very gracious and answered questions through our guide/interpreter. What was also interesting about the home we visited was that even though this woman has visitors in her home often, it was not "kept up for appearances". There was stuff piled around, shelves in the entry way that looked like they had years of clutter, dust, and debris piled on them, and piles of broken and unused stuff around the courtyard.
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